"I want it in the air over Suzdal in three days. And move the other ships up as fast as you can."
"The hangers above Vyzima are barely up, sir. Also, sir, it'll depend on the wind. We need a northeasterly, better yet an easterly to get up here."
"Get them up, and get those ships in the air, son. We won't have time to build up a fleet to surprise them, as we'd originally planned, but if they figure out what we're up to they'll swarm across the Neiper regardless of casualties.
"This Jubadi learned from Muzta's mistakes. He's being methodical, sparing his men. But he won't spare them if he thinks we're escaping. I need air protection."
Chuck smiled cautiously.
"I have a full card to do whatever I think necessary?"
"Of course. Your orders will be cut and ready for you when you leave."
Chuck smiled and sat back.
"Whatever you say, sir."
John looked over suspiciously at Chuck, sensing that Andrew might have given a far more sweeping order than he'd suspected, but he was too tired to care and said nothing.
John turned his gaze back toward Andrew. He realized that the entire operation was a fool's dream. Though Andrew had brushed it off, once the Merki broke through there would be nothing to slow them from a sharp run east with part of their forces. Positions along the White Hills would barely be ready to receive their attack.
He was feeding all of them a fantasy. This was the end of it all. He wanted to say something, but a sharp look from Andrew told him that now was not the time to say anything. He lowered his gaze, numbed by what was being asked of them yet again.
Tamuka grabbed hold of the branch, feeling it bow slightly with his weight. He pulled himself up and leaned back to sit against the trunk of the tree. It swayed slightly, the breeze coming out of the north, cool and fragrant. He looked back to the west. The wide trail through the forest, as far as the eye could carry, was packed with horses, warriors, and batteries of artillery, all of it moving forward like one slow, undulating serpent.
A terrible place this, he thought. His memory flashed back to the charge: the lone line of the Nav-hag sweeping forward, behind them column after column of umens, sweeping across the open steppe. And now this. Four days, and still less than a third of the northern wing up to the river. Below him the forest was packed with horses pawing through the leaves, the riverbank lined for fifty miles or more with the gathering host.
A shot fluttered through the night air trailing sparks, then burst above the trail. A scream of pain, then a warrior and his mount going down in a bloody heap, their torn bodies ghostly in the red moonlight.
Another gun fired, and he looked eastward. A ripple of fire raced down the line. Shells winging overhead, bursting along the trail, in the treetops. He felt foolishly naked. A hiss of shrapnel screamed past, cracking through the branches. More warriors went down, the column in confusion. The cattle guns fell silent.
Masterful, Tamuka thought grudgingly.
The fortifications across the river were imposing: two lines on the rising slope, the front of each a near impenetrable maze of sharpened stakes and brush. The shore line was covered with the bodies of three regiments that had attempted to storm across, only to be annihilated by the crossfire of the iron ships and the batteries lining the shore.
He closed his eyes, blocking out the cries of pain from below. His breath came strongly, pulsing in and out, rapidly and yet more rapidly. The tree swayed and the wind whispered a gentle voice through the branches, sighing, drawing each breath out, pushing each breath in. It seemed to say that he, the wind, and the sky were as one.
Tamuka's spirit soared.
He felt himself falling away, and though his tu knew it not, his hands clung yet more tightly to the branch, the husk preserving itself for the return.
There was a pulse of light flowing up out of the west, stretching back hundreds of miles. The life-Mood of his people, the Horde, relentlessly moving ever forward, the scent of the horses, of the peoples, the smell of the yurt, of the fires, of the open grasslands, the endless steppe floating about his tu, focusing his energy.
The spirits of the ancestors hovered, a vast river as well, forever flowing through the heavens above them, guiding them onward in their endless ride. His sightless eyes turned to the heavens, and could I see. Again that longing, a memory locked into his very soul, the memory arching out across the very heavens. The ancestors of the ancestors calling. We were once this, we who traveled the stars, who fashioned the tunnels of light to leap between worlds. Even unto the world of the cattle that we once trod in our youth, building the gateways upon its green surfaces, building the gates upon lands now buried by the seas, gateways upon their open steppes, in their vast mountains, in realms beneath turquoise oceans.
And it is gone, all of it gone—destroyed by our pride, our self-hatreds torn down ten thousand generations ago, until now all that is left of us rests here upon Valennia, the remnants of what we were in our greatness.
He felt his heart bursting with anguish—the understanding of all that had been lost, the memories seeping through his very bones, passed by the blood of his fathers into his own heart. A universe once in
our hands, and now we are but this, struggling with those whom we did not even deem to notice, when once we were masters of the stars. And now the ancestors whispered to him, they who were but in their dawning while we were at midday have risen. They have risen to come out, to come out to hunt us down thus, and to kill us.
The ancestors thus spoke to Tamuka, shield-bearer, spirit-walker of the tu, to the path of knowledge, and his soul wept bitter tears, the tu crying out in rage, so that even the husk, the ka, trembled as it clung to the tree, tears clouding its closed sightless eyes. For we are now in the evening of our days, and they shall leap into their bright morning.
O fathers! he cried with a soundless voice, cast back the suns in their turning, guide me back to the brightness of our noonday!
That, o Tamuka, was what we once were, the ancestors whispered in reply. Gaze upon our greatness and weep, for the circling is but a pale reflection of our greatest rides, when the universe was like the steppe and we gloried in our power. And now those whom we disdained have risen. Almost as if in taunting, sad, pained faces floated before his spirit, pointing to the heavens.
His spirit turned eastward, away from the realm of the ancestor who floated yet beside him, unable to bear the ineffable pain of his knowledge, focusing on the here, the now, and not all that had been lost in the distant past. For it was the past, one he had already gazed upon in tears, a glory he kept unto himself. To speak of it was to no purpose. He looked away from the dream-memories of ancestors not even born upon Valennia, guiding his spirit back up, up through the memories of the coming. Again he rode across the world, the endless generations trapped, living upon the memories of their past, and then came the cattle, and with them the gift of the ancestors, the horse, the liberator that had given them all the world to ride upon. Two hundred circlings, and what glory there was, the spirit of the ka, the warrior, the horse-rider, feeling the wind in one's face, the lamentations of their enemies, enemies though brothers, the glory of the charges, the celebrations of triumph, the lamentations of defeat, yet knowing there would be triumph yet again. For alter all, was it not all an illusion, the glory of this living? The circlings spun past through his wandering soul, images of a hundred ancestors whispering to him, laughing in their joy, crying in their anguish, rising to the endless ride of the everlasting sky when their brief moment had passed.
And then, at last, the image of his own sire drifted past, coming into his own. All of the generations of the Merki, the chosen ones. And in his heart was the warning, that the twilight of the ancestors, of all that they were, might very well be upon them, the realization shaking into his soul. The responsibility of halting it thrust into his heart, calling to his ka to seize what must be taken.
He looked eastward and the world ahead was dark, as if a curtain had been dr
awn across his sight. The powerful spirits of the cattle, blocking what he could see.
What is happening beyond the river, the boundary between us? He strove to go forward to see.
There was nothing but darkness, and yet even in the darkness there was a swirling, a strength, pulsing away, moving away, following the trails of iron. He felt a vague foreboding. If the strength was moving lo the east, what could this mean?
He looked back to the heavens, the Great Wheel which blazed through his soul, filling him with longing. But there was nothing to be heard there, no ancestor to help him pull back the veil.
They are far from finished, his tu whispered. Far from finished. They come to this world each time more powerful, coming out of our own past to haunt us, for if it was not for the Tunnels they would never be here.
He felt the clouding of spirits, the memory of all the Hordes, Merki, Bantag, Tugar, Kuvak, Org, all the peoples. We are old, he realized, old unto a million generations, of which our time here is but the briefest of flickers, a dying race upon a last lonely world.
And they are young, these cattle, rising up new, streaming with life, sweeping through the devices we have left behind, coming even unto this world as our slaves to turn and kill us in their defiance.
The ancestors were silent.
He felt a cold rage at their resignation, their blood which was one and now trembled.
Fate is not fate, he hissed, startled as his silent words echoed through the firmament. He bent his thoughts back to the east, to where they waited, the defiant few, the first trembling of the storm, a race coming out of the cradle to challenge.
They were drawing their strength eastward, but to what goal?
It would not form—only the foreboding of understanding whispered to him.
Then let the dying race suck the strength out of the new, and cast aside their dried husk.
We have grown fat and old in our ignorance ol what we have lost, he realized. Then let us take that strength, that knowledge back unto our selves and seize all that we once were.
He looked back to the heavens, and suddenly the steppe, the endless ride, were as nothing, the tottering
of an old one whose mind had fled while the ka staggered blindly.
There was a snap of light, a whistling shriek. He felt a warmth, a sting.
The tu returned inward, the vision fading.
He felt a throbbing pain in his arm. Opening his eyes, he saw the trickle of blood coursing down his sleeve, his leather armor torn open at the shoulder, the flesh of upper arm laid open in a shallow cut. The jagged fragment of shell that had struck him was sticking out of the tree trunk.
There was another flash overhead, and yet more screams from the trail below.
With a grim understanding at last, Tamuka ( limbed down from the tree and stalked away into the shadows of night.
He had laid out his plan, the tu whispering to him. He had groomed his chosen one for years, tormenting and then rewarding. If the cattle acted either way, the plan in the end would be the same, and Tamuka smiled.
"Line is cleared up to Kennebec station!" the telegrapher shouted, standing outside his office and looking up with awe.
Jack Petracci nodded, tapping the exhaust vent. The Flying Cloud, lowered ever so imperceptibly.
Ground crews, standing on the empty flatcars, waved the all-clear, securing the last line in place.
Anxiously, Jack looked at the locomotive engine a hundred feet below.
"Feyodor, cable release secured?"
Feyodor leaned out of his chair, hanging nearly upside-down.
"Looks in place, Captain."
Jack reached down with his right hand and grabbed hold of the ring bolt. According to Chuck, one yank
would release all the cables holding the aerosteamer to the train below.
"All ready!" Jack shouted, trying to conceal his outright terror at this mad plan. Chuck had outlined it months before, and it had seemed all so simple on paper. But like everything else about this insane project it was a first, the testing would be in the doing, and if something went wrong it'd be his life that was forfeit.
Towing the ship by rail all the way back to Vyzima had seemed easy enough when sitting around a table. Get a train, hook some cables, and away we go.
Now it was real. A hundred feet below, the engine was hissing, occasional sparks wafting up from the smokestack, a light breeze coming out of the north and pushing the ship south of the track. Feyodor revved the engine up slightly and Jack pushed the rudder over to keep the ship stationary.
The hundred men of the ground crew were standing on the flatcars, looking up anxiously. All of the equipment for the Flying Cloud—barrels of fuel, hopper cars loaded with zinc, a lead, line-sealed tank full of sulfuric acid for making hydrogen—all of it had been loaded up and moved down to the main line of the MFL & S railroad.
Jack looked off to the north. The entire city of Hispania seemed to have turned out for this one. The secret of what was going on in the woods above the city had been revealed at last.
"Waiting for you, sir!" the locomotive engineer shouted through a speaking trumpet.
Jack looked over his shoulder at Feyodor.
"All set, Captain."
Jack gulped hard and, pulling a green signal flag out from under the seat, waved it.
The engineer disappeared back into his cab. A puff of smoke shot up, and Jack winced.
The train started to inch forward.
The cables went taut, the aerosteamer straining against the pull and dropping down slightly.
He looked back over his shoulder again at the long shadow cast behind him by the setting sun. The shadow moved over the water tower behind the station.
The puffing from below came at shorter intervals.
The brass gauge, fashioned by his recommendation to measure the flow of wind, started to move, the pointer on the dial shifting past five miles an hour.
As the engine picked up speed, the balloon continued to shift down closer to the ground.
"Give us some throttle!" Jack shouted.
Feyodor responded and the propeller, which was clicking over slowly, shifted into a stuttering blur.
The balloon rose back up.
Jack continued to wave the green flag. The engine below accelerated.
"Fifteen miles to the hour."
Telegraph poles, by pure luck laid out on the north side of the track, started to drift past. The engine continued to move forward, the sound of the clicking rails echoing up.
The ship shuddered, a gust of breeze shifting it out to the south. Jack pushed the rudder over, lining back up, the aerosteamer now pulling back astern. He pulled out a yellow flag and waved it.
The engine speed leveled out at just over twenty miles to the hour.
It was going to be one hell of a long trip, and Jack tried to settle back in his chair and let the tangled
knot of queasiness in his stomach loosen up.
* * *
Chuck stood to the side, watching as the first of his aerosteamer fleet gradually disappeared westward, back to the front from which he had returned.
"Think it will work?" Vincent asked, standing beside him with arms crossed over his narrow chest.
"Got to. We built them out here where they'd be safe. If the Merki ships found out what we were doing before we got into the air, we'd be sunk before we even got up. Tricky maneuver, this—too much strain and it could tear the ship apart, or maybe even derail the train. Try it alone and we'll burn through engine time like mad, might not even make it.
"Those damn Merki aerosteamers can stay up forever with those engines they got, wherever the hell they got them from. Love to get a hold of one and tear it apart."
"You know the orders," Vincent said quietly. "Some sort of poison in them. They're to be buried."
"Damn it, I know."
"The first battle between aerosteamers ... I'd love to see it," Vincent whispered.
"Did you like flying?"
&nb
sp; Vincent smiled.
"The last ride I took was interesting."
Again that smile, and Chuck said nothing.
The whistle of the train on the siding sounded.
"Time to get going," Vincent said, looking back at the train. It was packed with the first load of refugees moved out of Suzdal the morning since the conference. Every car was crammed to overflowing. Kal had loaned his personal car to Chuck, Marcus, and Vincent for the return, and they had shared it with fifty mothers and over a hundred screaming infants
Chuck wrinkled his nose in disdain—if that's what being a father was all about, they could keep it. The smell of swaddling clothes, spit-up milk, and a hundred unwashed babies had driven him out to the platform on more than one occasion. Marcus had surprised him by acting almost like a politician. He'd held more than one wailing child. A strange sight: A true patrician—gray haired, chiseled features, still holding to the traditional breastplate and red cape— rocking a screaming child in his arms.
"Hell of a fight coming up," Vincent said quietly, looking back to the west.
"You sound like you're looking forward to it, Vincent."
The general looked over at Chuck and smiled.
"I am."
He turned and walked away.
"A strange fish."
Chuck looked over at Theodor, who had watched with open envy as his twin brother flew off to war.
"Too much war either kills you or makes you crazy."
"Or both."
"Perhaps," Chuck said quietly.
A high-pitched tooting cut through the yard.
"Our train," Chuck said. He started toward the toylike engine waiting to take him up to the aero-steamer hangers and his factory.
"Do whatever you want," Andrew had said, and he smiled. John would be far too busy now to miss some powder, some high-grade steel, a couple of boring machines. Mark it off to the aerosteamer program.
"Why are you laughing?" Theodor asked.
"You'll find out. Now let's get back home and get Yankee Clipper launched."
"Jesus Christ, what a mess," Pat groaned.
Andrew could only nod his head in agreement. The rail yard was bad enough. The city was emptying out already, so that after only four days the streets seemed empty. No longer did the sound of laughing children, the bustle of the market, the singing in the churches, the hum of life echo through the streets. Six thousand more had left before dawn, all semblance of order nearly disintegrating as hysterical families were pulled apart—men staying behind till the last, women and children leaning out of car windows or sitting forlornly on flatcars that were heaped with their meager possessions. Their only connection to the future was a numbered card held by the males telling them which train their family had departed on. The trains had pulled out in silence, so that the watchers on the other side of the river would not hear.
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